[T] - Feather M0 WiFi - ATSAMD21 + ATWINC1500

A M0 Microcontroller with WiFi connectivity and Feather FormFactor - Compact and powerful development platform

Feather is a new development board from AdaFruit. As its name suggest, this card is fine, light!
Adafruit has been designed to become a new standard for portable projects based on microcontrollers. 

Here is the AdaFruit Feather M0 WiFi module with ATWINC1500 - here is an Arduino compatible 'all-in-one' + high speed + reliable WiFi connection + USB support and battery charger. 
It's a AdaFruit Feather M0 with WiFi module ready to use! We have other boards from the Feather family, see our range here!

Connect your Feather to the Internet with this brand new FCC certified Atmel WiFi module. ATWINC1500 is a 802.11bgn WiFi module and certainly represents the best option to connect your peripherals in WiFi while benefiting from low energy management, Access Point (Soft-AP), SSL support and exceptional stability. This product has been tested by Arduino on its MQTT Adafruit.io demo for several days without any problem (not even a jolt!).

In comparison with other WiFi modules, the ATWINC1500 is very efficient (fast) and easy to implement (a "best-of").

The module works on 802.11b, g or n networks and WEP, WPA, WPA2 encryption support.                         You can connect to your WiFi network or create your own WiFi network by using the "Soft AP" mode.
AdaFruit also offers to create a WiFi access point + WEB service to control the pins of your Arduino via this "Web server". You can communicate with on the module bus with a clock frequency of up to 12MHz, enough to consider reliable packet streaming.  Vous pouvez communiquer avec sur le bus du module avec une fréquence d'horloge pouvant atteindre 12MHz, de quoi envisager un streaming des paquets fiables.
Network scanning and correction is very fast, around 1 to 2 seconds.

You might wonder why use such a product when the Feather HUZZAH already exists?
With the Feather ATWINC1500, you get:

• A very efficient Cortex M0+ processor with more input/output pins, several 12-bit ADC analog/digital converters, a digital/analog converter (DAC 10-bit), 6 SERCOMs which can each be used as SPI, I2C bus or UART (3 of them are used by existing interfaces, which leaves you 3 3), a profusion of timers, PWM, DMA, native USB support and more (see the product sheet)
• ATWINC offers much lower consumption, around 12mA for WINC and 10mA for Cortex ATSAMD21 with auto-powermanagement on the WiFi module (and without energy management for ARM). By manually controlling the energy management , you can reduce the consumption of the WiFi module to around ~2mA by placing it in sleep mode.  
• Low consumption compared to ESP which requires ~70mA (on avarage) and whose sleep mode require a WDT Reset (Watchdog Timer Reset).
• More reliable streaming with an ATWINC (less bandwidth overload), the ESP has however a a higher speed. 
• Your performance doesn't depend on the WiFi module (like ESP) since you have a separated microcontroller. You Reign supreme and have complete control over your processor and execution times.

Both Feather ATWINC and ESP modules have WiFi functionality with their respective advantages and disadvantages. 

At the heart of a Feather M0, you'll find a ARM Cortex M0 ATSAMD21G18 clocked at 48Mhz and using 3.3V logic. It's the same hardware platform as an Arduino Zero. This microcontroller has a FLASH memory of 256Ko (8x more than an Atmega 328 or 32u4) and 32Ko of RAM (16x more)! 
It also has native USB support which allows you to take advantage for USB-to-Serial programming and debugging phase via this same interface without the need of a FTDI component.
Users who are comfortable with ASF (Atmel Software Framework) will find the SWDIO/SWCLK signals available under the board. Signals that can be connected to a CMSIS-DAP debugger to allow debugging with Atmel Studio.

To make it really easy to use in portable projects, AdaFruit had the excellent idea of adding a connector for LiPo (Lithium polymer) 3.7V battery and a charging circuit. It's not absolutely necessary to use a battery, you can very well power the Feather directly from a micro USb connector. If you have a battery, it will be recharged when you connect the board via microUSB. The Feather will automatically select its power source between USB (as soon as available) and the battery.    
The battery is also connected to an analog pin via a divider bridge, this tip is very practical to allow to measure and monitor the battery voltage to warn the user that a recharge is necessary.

Technical details

• Dimensions: 51mm x 23mm x 8mm (without welded connector on the board).
• Really light : 4.6 grammes
• ATSAMD21G18 @ 48MHz with logic 3.3V
• 256KB of FLASH memory + 32KB of RAM
• No EEPROM
• Crystal 32.768 KHz for clock signal & RTC (real time clock)
• 3.3V regulator supporting current peaks at 500mA
• Native USB support, supplied with USB bootloader and serial port for debugging
• 20 GPIO pins
• Hardware serial port, hardware I2C bus, hardware SPI bus
• PWM output on all pins
• 6 x analog inputs with 12-bit resolution
• 1 x analog output (DAC) with 10-bit resolution
• Integration of a Lipoly charger at 100mA (with LED indicator of charge status) 
• Red LED on pin #13 (available for any use)
• Power/enable pin
• 4 mounting holes
• Reset button (Reset)
• FCC ID: VW4ATWINC1500 (fccid.io)
• SAMD21 product sheet (pdf)

Comes fully assembled and tested, programmed with a USB bootloader that allows you to get started quickly using Arduino IDE. Includes a row of male connectors, wich would allow you to connect the Feather on a breadboard after a few welding operations.   
Lipoly battery and MicroUSB cable not included (but you'll easily find them in our shop)